Migrants wait aboard a navy ship before being disembarked in the Sicilian harbor of Augusta, June 1, 2014. Some 43,000 people have crossed from North Africa to Italy so far this year, the same number as in the whole of 2013, the coastguard said.

A Danish immigration report on Eritrea that suggests changing refugee policy for Eritrean asylum seekers is deeply flawed. Denmark and other European governments should await the outcome of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea, established in June 2014, before considering any major policy changes concerning Eritrea.

The House of Lords should amend the Modern Slavery Bill to restore the right for migrant domestic workers to change employers, Human Rights Watch and the United Kingdom charity Kalayaan said today. The bill is being considered in the House of Lords, the UK’s upper chamber of parliament, during the week of February 23, 2015.

Serious concerns about workers’ rights have not been resolved for a high-profile project in Abu Dhabi that will host branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums and a campus of New York University (NYU), Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These institutions should make their continued engagement with the Saadiyat Island project contingent on the developers’ commitment to more serious enforcement of worker protections and the compensation of workers who suffered abuses, including those arbitrarily deported after they went on strike.

The UAE authorities in 2014 aggressively restricted the rights of freedom of expression, association, and assembly, cracking down on dissidents and anyone considered a threat to national security, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2015. The authorities also failed to investigate credible allegations that security forces arbitrarily detained and tortured dissidents.

Thai agricultural workers in Israel face serious labor rights abuses because Israeli authorities are failing to enforce their own laws, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Israeli authorities should take immediate steps to improve its enforcement mechanisms and investigate whether unsatisfactory living and working conditions have contributed to a troubling pattern of deaths among migrant workers from Thailand.

There have been some encouraging reforms in Kuwait since its last UPR in 2010. For example, in January 2013 a judicial decision granted women the right to apply for posts as prosecutors, allowing them to therefore enter the career path to become judges eventually. However Kuwait has yet to reform any of the provisions in its personal status laws that discriminate against women.

The kafala visa-sponsorship system that is widely, though not uniformly, used across the Gulf bars most migrant domestic workers from moving to a new job before their original contract ends without their employer’s consent, trapping many in abusive situations. The kafala combined with inadequate labor law protections, create conditions ripe for exploitation and abuse of domestic workers.

A Danish immigration report on Eritrea that suggests changing refugee policy for Eritrean asylum seekers is deeply flawed. Denmark and other European governments should await the outcome of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea, established in June 2014, before considering any major policy changes concerning Eritrea.